Wendee Wechsberg

Background

About Wendee Wechsberg

Dr. Wendee M. Wechsberg is the Director of the RTI Global Gender Center, a cross-cutting initiative at RTI International that highlights and catalyzes collaborative gender-focused research, the Director of the Substance Use, Gender and Applied Research Program at RTI International, and the President of WomenNC. Dr. Wechsberg also serves as Adjunct Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) Gillings School of Global Public Health, Adjunct Professor of Psychology at North Carolina State University (NCSU), and Adjunct Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. Dr. Wechsberg started her career as an addiction clinician and later as a treatment director, but since 1994 has devoted her career fulltime to applied mixed methods research to develop and test the efficacy of HIV prevention interventions among diverse populations. Dr. Wechsberg is well known for The Woman-Focused HIV Prevention program, known as the Women’s CoOP, which is listed as one of the CDC’s best-evidence HIV behavioral prevention interventions. The Women’s CoOP has been adapted to serve diverse, underserved, and vulnerable key adult and adolescent populations in the US, South Africa, the Republic of Georgia, and Russia. In 2008, Dr. Wechsberg was ranked third among all NIH-funded researchers who received HIV investigator-initiated grants (Science, 321[5880], 520–521). Her current research is funded by NICHD and NIDA. Dr. Wechsberg has published extensively in the areas of gender and ethnicity, outreach, substance abuse treatment, HIV risk, cultural adaptations, and intervention outcomes. In 2013, she was awarded NIDA’s International Mentoring Award. She recently was awarded a NIDA Pioneer Certificate, which recognizes two decades of international collaborations.